Yale University Library
This late-medieval document is written in encoded text that has yet to be cracked. But its numerous illustrations provide clues about its content.
Thomas Val/Unsplash
In Kairos, a relationship between a young woman and an older married man captures the difficulties and ambivalences of German reunification.
Five handicapped Jewish prisoners, photographed for propaganda purposes, who arrived in Buchenwald after Kristallnacht.
Holocaust Memorial Museum/Photograph #13132
In 2023, International Holocaust Remembrance Day marks 90 years since the Nazis assumed power. Disabled people were the first Holocaust victims; Nazi programs discriminated against and murdered them.
Pupils from a German ‘Napola’ at Ballenstedt before a football game with a visiting side from an English public school.
Even after the notorious Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938, some headmasters thought pupil exchanges with Nazi Germany were a good idea.
Hermann Goering takes the witness stand at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
akg-images / Alamy Stock Photo
The complex history of prosecuting Nazi war crimes means elderly men and women are on trial for crimes committed decades ago.
Members of the Ossewabrandwag on parade during WWII. The then political opposition collaborated with the Germans.
OB Photo Collection/Records, Archives and Museum Division, North-West University
Following the war, the South African authorities were anxious to charge known war criminals, traitors and collaborators. But nothing came of it.
Triadic Ballet costumes by Oskar Schlemmer, 1922.
Wikimedia Commons
Stuttgart flies under the radar as a tourist destination but it is a treasure trove of Expressionist art and works that exemplify post-war modernity.
Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire. Joseph Mallord William Turner, c 1815.
The National Gallery
New linguistic research suggest early Germanic language and culture was strongly influenced by the Mediterranean superpower Carthage more than 2,000 years ago.
Protesters in Berlin demand that the 1904-1908 mass killings in Namibia be recognised as the first genocide committed by Germany.
Supplied/Courtesy of Joachim Zeller
The culture of remembrance in Germany is viewed by many as exemplary. But it has some grave shortcomings.
A trainload of expelled ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia arrives in Bavaria, Germany, after World War II.
dpa/picture alliance via Getty Images
After World War II ended in Europe, millions of ethnic Germans faced an uncertain future. The political repercussions of their expulsion continue even today.
Adolf Hitler surrounded by German supporters in 1937.
De Agostini Editorial
A trove of essays long forgotten in the archives of the Hoover Institution give insight into what attracted everyday women to extremist ideology.
shutterstock.
An in-depth study has shown that far from recruiting from the lower middle classes, the Nazi party attracted many people from high-status backgrounds.
Daniel Günther, prime minister of Schleswig-Holstein, at the Swakopmund monument to colonial concentration camp victims.
Facebook/Germany Embassy, Windhoek
Germany praises itself for having declared a ‘special responsibility’ for Namibia since independence. But the relationship is viewed differently from Windhoek.
Slavery is not so far removed. Anderson and Minerva Edwards met in the 1860s as enslaved laborers in Texas, had 16 children and lived into their 90s in a cabin a few miles from the plantations they once worked. They are photographed here in 1937.
U.S. Library of Congress
Old injustices don’t simply disappear with time – they tear a nation apart.
Red Rosa.
EPA/Oliver Weiken
Though best remembered for her role in the doomed German Revolution, Rosa Luxemburg’s theories on how capitalism exploits people and nature need hearing today.
Flowers on a memorial to Rosa Luxemburg in Berlin, 100 years after her murder.
EPA-EFE
It’s been 100 years since the murder of Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg.
Copyright DAV/Deutsche Himalaja-Stiftung
A new exhibition captures the moment when Germany started to rebuild her national pride, in the Himalayan mountains.
Demonstrators in Berlin demand justice for Namibian victims of German genocide.
Joachim Zeller
The third repatriation of human remains in August this year was another missed opportunity for reconciliation between Germany and Namibia.
Joseph Goebbels, left, shows the ‘people’s receiver’ to Adolf Hitler at a radio exhibition in 1933.
Badische Zeitung
Under an authoritarian government, freedoms can come at a steep – and lasting – price.
The crosses at Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France.
Jonathan Ebel
Writings at the time of WWI aimed to construct a religiously diverse and conflicted America into a virtuous, Christian nation. This narrative continued in the cemeteries for the war heroes.